Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Carding Tutorial

I recently got my drum carder back after a brief hiatus, and now I want to card All The Things! It started with these bundles of Hello Yarn Club Fiber:

(Original fiber on the right in all pictures)

.....moved on to this:

...and then came the Wensleydale (as usual):

A few people expressed interest in a wee photo tutorial of this process, so I decided to document the whole thing, and HERE YA GO!
STACIE'S SWIFTY CARDING TUTORIAL!

Step One:
Find a nice fiber with hearty contrast and make sure the colors don't bleed into each other too much. I'm using HY "Pate de Fruit" in Rambouillet.

Step Two:
I usually fold up my fiber and align the colors to get a better idea of just how many breaks I should make. In this case, I'm going with the darkest blue-grey, light blue, mint green, ochres, that coral-esque color, brightest pinks, darker purples, and the brown-purple tone.

Step Three:
Tear it all apart! I tear it up as close to the color splits as I can, but I don't worry too much about other colors getting in there. That will just add to the heathering of each batt.

Step Four:
Open up each bundle of color and run it through the carder. Be patient, take your time. This picture isn't that great, but I really make sure to open things up and spread out any errant colors.

Step Five:
Here are 2 of the color bundles run through the carder. You can see that there is a little bit of striping in the closer one, that's because I only ran it through the carder once at this point, so the colors aren't completely blended.

Step Six:
Here are all 8 of the colors, having gone through the carder once. Some of these are really close in tone (especially those two on the left), but I'm going to run them through a second time and see how they come out before deciding if I want to combine them.

Step Seven:
....And here they are after the second pass through the carder. The colors are better blended. I could run them through a third (or fourth) time at this point, but I'm happy with how they look now.

Step Eight:
Bundle 'em up and admire your work! The lighter bundles here are all very close, but I think I can use them nicely for some colorwork, with subtle changes.